The Scorecard: Holding Officials Accountable

Welcome to the first edition of The Scorecard!

The Scorecard is a new weekly feature in which we will hold elected and appointed officials accountable to the voters. We will not do this by what a pundit believes they should be scored on or even what you and I think that they should be scored on. We will score them on what they promised versus what they delivered.

So welcome to: The Scorecard

Republican Party

What They Promised:

The GOP promised that Trump would come in with a shock-and-awe approach. Trump would make a rapid-fire number of top nominations who would then be quickly either appointed by the Senate or the Senate would just recess, and his picks would automatically be able to take up terms that would last up to two years. Two years is critical, by the way. Put a pin in that for a future blog post.

What They Delivered:

Well, so far, we haven't really had shock and awe. We've had shock and awful. We've had one major nominee get booted out of the nomination process. We've had one nominee drop out of the process. And we have another nominee out there, just dying on the vine. Notably, the one who got booted and the one who's dying on the vine are both suffering from allegations of different types of sexual abuse.

So we may be kinda shocked, but not in the way Trump and his team intended.

Democratic Party

What They Promised:

What the Democratic Party promised was a Kamala Harris victory that would bring in an era of joyous optimism. 

What They Delivered:

A loss that has resulted in a state of depression for half of the electorate.  The results show that it was a close race, but Presidential politics aren't horseshoes or slow dancing ( does anybody under 50 even know what I mean by that?) There are a lot of reasons Kamala failed to win. However, one of the core reasons is the Latino vote. It is not so much that the Republican Party has greatly won Latinos over from last year to this year it was because a lot of Latino Democrats and independent voters who have voted for Democratic candidates failed to show up. However, it must be stated that, yes, there was a significant number of Latinos that voted for Trump. 

A group that did show up within the Latino constituency was Latino men who just felt like the Democratic Party had really not addressed their concerns.

Here's the big note: It's not that Latino men feel that the Democrats have not kept their promises. They think that nobody on the Dem side is even taking the time to make any promises to them. The result was that instead of fearing Trump, they decided to go with Trump because at least he made promises. We will keep score on whether he keeps those commitments or not.

So today's scorecard as 2024 draws to a close and we look forward to the glorious 2025 is:

GOP: 0 - Dems: 0

Let the next round of games begin!